Dear Colleagues, As you may have already seen on other mailing lists, APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asian Pacific region, has reached the end of their pool of available IPv4 addresses. As of Friday April 15, they have activated their "final /8" policy, which was decided upon by the APNIC community [1]. This event in itself does not have any effect on the amount of IPv4 addresses which are still available within the RIPE NCC service region. But we would like to remind you that eventually the RIPE community will have to deal with the same situation. We would like to point out that he RIPE community has decided that an LIR must already have IPv6 addresses before they become eligible for their final allocation under the final /8 policy. This requirement is in addition to having a demonstrated need for address space. For more information about this, please refer to section 5.6 of the IPv4 Address Allocation and Assignment Policies for the RIPE NCC Service Region [2]. We would like to urge the community to start deploying IPv6 as soon as possible if they haven't done so already. This is the only way to support the long-term growth of the Internet and ensure the continuity of their operations. And if you have already deployed IPv6 in your network, please share your experiences for others to learn from. Greetings, The IPv6 working group chairs, Marco, David & Shane [1] http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8 [2] http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-509